Josh Brolin and his fellow Gangster Squad antiheroes certainly have their work cut out for them fighting Mickey Cohen, the 1940s mobster psychopath Sean Penn plays with visceral glee.

You can’t help wonder, though, if Brolin’s Sgt. John O’Mara and his fellow LAPD hard nuts aren’t after the wrong villain.

Better they should be looking for the heinous computer boffins who turned Gangster Squad from film noir homage into a lurid cartoon, something that seeks the drama of The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential but instead apes the empty theatrics of Dick Tracy. It’s as if somebody took an old black-and-white Warner Bros. gangster flick, colourized it all to hell, and then turned the contrast dials way up on the monitor.

Not that those boffins should take all the heat. Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) directs and cinematographer Dion Beebe (Miami Vice) shoots as if they’re assembling a comic book, using blood and bullets to leap the blank space between the frames.

And screenwriter Will Beall, a former L.A. homicide detective, lards on so much sardonic period dialogue, even a mere shoeshine boy sounds as if he’s auditioning for a Dragnet remake.

Beall isn’t at all averse to the groaner. When Cohen orders one of his thugs to whack a guy, telling him “you know the drill,” the thug produces a giant electric drill. (All this scene needed was Arnold Schwarzenegger in the background, shouting, “Screw youuuuu!”)

The actors do their best, but they’re bringing their “A” game to a decidedly “B” production, with Penn being the most enthusiastic of this game crew.

Penn doesn’t just chew scenery, he devours entire gardens as Cohen, a former Brooklyn boxer turned L.A. crime kingpin. Cohen may be a newcomer to the City of Angels, seen in all its post-Second World War frenzy, but he’s got a big piece of every illegal activity going, from drugs to gambling to rental dames.

He has a high opinion of himself, declaring himself to be God and also “I am progress!” He’s not the least bit torn by this, although the crime rival he has ripped to shreds beneath the Hollywood sign certainly is. Penn seems to have found inspiration in Al Pacino’s homicidal crime boss in Dick Tracy, and that includes the prosthetic face remodeling.

Cohen has bought off so many cops and judges, he prompts a grave and gravelly observation from one of L.A.’s few remaining good guys, Police Chief Parker (Nick Nolte): “This isn’t a crime wave, it’s an enemy occupation.”

Parker wants Brolin’s O’Mara, a cop so square even his own wife says he’s “not much for abstract thinking,” to assemble a squad of midnight marauders to take down Cohen. These outlaw cops will work off-book and off-badge, with no official sanction and no thanks whatsoever.

Who could refuse an offer like this? But O’Mara manages to round up a redeemable cynic (Ryan Gosling), a terse sharpshooter (Robert Patrick) and his eager protégé (Michael Peña), a gadget brainiac (Giovanni Ribisi) and a flash cat with a sharp knife (Anthony Mackie).

What follows is an endless volley of rat-tat-tat and drip-drip-drip, as the bullets fly and the blood flows to sickening excess, even for a Hollywoodized gangster film where the machine gun volleys mostly just pierce cars while magically sparing the occupants.

O’Mara’s gangster squad members give as good as they get from Cohen and his goons. They work with bloody gusto but not much character nuance. Just one of them, Ribisi’s conflicted Officer Conway Keeler, bothers to stop to ask whether the line between good guy and bad guy has been erased. And then the bullets fly again.

And so might the viewer express the same concern, especially since Gangster Squad has been caught up in the current dragnet of public concern over gun violence. The film was supposed to come out last fall, but it was pulled for emergency reshoots after a theatre bloodbath scene was too close to the real horror of last summer’s movie massacre in Aurora, Colo.

Given the amount of blood that still splashes the screen, you have to wonder just how bad the excised material was.

There’s not much room for women in a film like this, even with Emma Stone playing femme fatale to Gosling, her co-star in Crazy, Stupid, Love. The sizzle their pairing brought to that film is all but extinguished in the rematch.

The only other woman of note in Gangster Squad is Mireille Enos, an actress best know for her TV work (The Killing, Big Love), who plays Brolin’s sassy wife, and plays her well.

That crack about her hubby’s lack of abstract thinking? She could be talking about Gangster Squad, a paint-by-numbers cartoon police story with unrealized ambitions and an unfortunate body count.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.